>>>Too bad it does nothing to control costs and everything to encourage consumption.
>>>How do you think that equation will end up?
>>
>>My bet, as a "I told you so... see it can't work". Because that's where it's doomed to end. Will not happen in this country.
>
>Yes, unlimited demand meets limited resources.
>
>Government Health Care for All: Combining the legendary cost efficiency of the Pentagon with the care and compassion of the DMV.

Actually, long before this, while the whole debate was still on the back burner, I have found somewhere that the public health care (Medicare and such) had only 2% overhead cost, while the multiple bureaucracies of insurers et al have an average of almost 30%. An anecdotal evidence to the latter is the fact that when we paid for some minor surgery, we got an immediate 25% discount because we were uninsured.

>It is a fiction that un-insured people cannot get medical services, nobody can be turned away from an emergency room,

Which is extremely cost ineffective. When it comes to emergency room, there aren't any cheap fixes left, it's a knowing emergency. Prevention is immeasurably cheaper, but nobody wants to pay for it. Specially not private insurers, because they, by nature of their business, can't afford to do anything long term. Their pricing schemes are changing annually, and the payers are shopping around every year or two. Why would they invest in longer term prevention, if it may drive down competitors' costs? And even when they do cover prevention (like "one free checkup a year"), it turns out that they don't - our daughter believed them and then had to pay in full.

>so our working poor take their sniffling kids there and use $3,000 worth of services when a free / very low price medical clinic could provide a nurse practitioner visit and generic medicines for less than $10.

And the expensive medicines aren't worth it most of the time - considering that the good old generics often have fewer side effects, so in the long run they reduce further consumption of medications.

>If free/cheap clinics were lawsuit-proof and had long lines, the indigent and working poor could be served without any pressure to serve the middle class at all.
>
>The medical "Reform" in congress was originally sold as providing care to the uninsured, but is just an experiment with socialism.
>It's gonna be great.

It's this twisted perception of socialism that will bring you exactly what you feared: between two evils, you will see that the worst of both was cherrypicked and put into practice (pun intended).